Tips to avoid year-end expense management disaster

Regardless of the size of your business we all know closing the fiscal year is a challenging expense management task. Every department, from finance to accounting, is pushing hard to wrap up reports and prepare for the holidays.

But here’s the deal: streamlining your expense management, creating a best practice process and using automation to increase visibility you can give your finance team the data they need to succeed. In this blog post, we show you how to accomplish that.

How to create a best practice expense management process?
When asked, most business would say their expense process is solid. But if you dig into it you can find a lot of struggles such as:
• having a hard time accounting for employee’s expenses
• swimming into a pool of receipts
• unresolved discussions between the accountant and the receipt submitting employee for more information
• undocumented expenses that can turn into fines, legal fees, and revenue leakage
All these can expose your company to great financial risk. So here are a few ways to be proactive and prevent this:
• review the entire expense process
• smooth out bottlenecks
• clarify areas of ambiguity
• ensure every player involved understands their responsibility
• as a CFO, ensure the process is smooth and rules are being followed
• set goals, internal gamification or create a culture of accountability

How to utilize an automated system for better visibility?
There are still lots of business out there that use a manual expense process. The main reason is cost. But when calculating the total amount of manual hours vs the cost of implementing a new expense automation technology, it turns out that in the long run automation is cheaper. Additionally, an automated system can do so much more:
• Create visibility for your team to track expenses and forecast more accurately.
• Bring communication to the cloud and giving employees the ability to conduct business outside the office with ease.
• Having access to features such as photographing and submitting a receipt on the go for decreasing chances of lost receipts and faster expense closing cycle.

Here’s the kicker:
In order to be able to update your expense process, you have to be open to learning new ways and be able to educate yourself. Not only understanding best practices but also knowing how to implement them and become a leader by example for your team. Change can be hard, and moving to automation can be intimidating. But with the proper technology and the right support, we can turn uncertainty into success!

To learn more, you can watch our webinar, 5 Ways to Beat Finance Season. Our guest speaker Trevor Wolf from Concur will go over how companies are utilizing expense management to achieve financial success.

For further assistance, feel free reach out by submitting the contact form below.